Get the Full Picture Before You Hire a Wedding Videographer

January 26, 2017

When you watch a film trailer it’s designed to excite you, to intrigue you and to make you want to see more, obviously. Film trailers are an art in themselves. They’re all about telling enough of the story to get you interested without giving too much away. And they do it quickly. They have just two minutes and 30 seconds in which get the message across.

The trouble with film trailers is that they can all seem a bit samey – the deep voiceover, the fast cuts, in fact the whole accelerated narrative. When you see a trailer you’re not getting the full picture.

When you’re choosing a wedding filmmaker or videographer you want to be sure about what you’re going to get – the stakes are much higher than going to see the latest blockbuster. This is your film and you want to be sure that, for your wedding day, it will be exactly what you want. After all, there won’t be a chance for a re-shoot.

What to Look For

Styles vary with wedding films, from highly edited montages to documentary spontaneity. The traditional, amateur wedding video is usually a point-and-shoot affair – often with mixed results. This is because professional wedding filmmaking is an art, and however magic your wedding day feels at the time, capturing its essence requires a great deal of skill and professional knowledge.

Short extracts of wedding films may give you some idea of the level of quality you should expect from the finished piece, but they won’t tell you how the whole composition works.

Your wedding day is a story, and a good wedding film will tell this story. It will have a narrative flow that builds towards peak moments in the day. Naturally, extracts of the film may be these peak moments, but, like a film trailer, on their own these cannot tell the whole story, or even indicate whether the whole story has been told well.

Ask to see full, finished examples of work when choosing your wedding filmmaker. That way you get the whole story and you see how the it all has been puts together.

How it Works for Your Wedding

Wedding films need to get the balance right – between telling your personal story and expressing it with a degree of cinematic flourish. On the one hand, you don’t want the finished film to be too grand or flashy and impersonal; on the other, you want to see something of enduring quality that rises above the idea of a video camera simply pointing at events and filming them statically.

The examples you look at before you make your choice should let you know that the filmmaker has the right professional approach, but also that they can capture the unique, individual quality of a wedding day; that they can tell your own story well.

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Manchester Wedding Videography

I tell love stories on film, making your wedding that much more memorable, so that you can relive your wedding day and share your love. I cover Manchester, Cheshire, Lancashire and the North West but can work further afield on request, including destination weddings abroad.